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Taylor Swift is showering her BFF Selena Gomez with love following the release of her vulnerable My Mind & Me documentary on Friday (Nov. 4).
“So proud of you @selenagomez Love you forever [teary eyed emoji],” Swift wrote alongside a re-share of the film’s trailer on her Instagram Stories. See it here before it disappears.
Earlier this week, Gomez opened up on her newly curated SiriusXM Radio channel about her longtime friendship with the “Anti-Hero” singer. “The most influential artist, for me, it is kind of Taylor,” the singer said of her bestie. “Not because she’s my friend, but she has been an artist that can transition into so many different genres and she is able to do it seamlessly and I admire that so much. And that’s so rare. I love her process and I just admire all the work that she’s done. She’s definitely inspired me.”
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In her new Apple TV+ documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me, the star goes deeper than ever before on her journey through mental health struggles. “I guess when we started to record footage of the Revival Tour, we initially thought that we were gonna do a concert tour video, and during the tour I had to cancel it because I was going through a lot of stuff personally. So we decided to stop,” she explained of the project’s origins.
“Then the Kenya trip kind of came up and we decided we wanted to record that trip. So it really wasn’t gonna be a documentary until the end when we filmed all the stuff and where I am now,” the singer continued. “I can tell that it was gonna be something bigger than just a puff piece…I want it to be about the conversation around mental health and ways that we can change the conversation. I feel like a human sacrifice. I’m like throwing my personal life in to hopefully have this conversation be bigger and transcend.”
While Selena Gomez has always been open about her struggles with mental health, lupus, heartbreak and the highs and lows of fame, but fans got a closer look than ever in her new, aptly titled AppleTV+ documentary, My Mind & Me, which hits the streaming service on Friday (Nov. 4).
The Alek Keshishian-helmed film is a raw look at mental health, pulling back the curtain of fame to reveal a young woman who is actively working on her complicated relationship with loving and accepting herself. “It’s OK to feel not good enough and to feel like you’re complicated and complex. It’s just about having a healthy relationship with how you talk to yourself, how you seek help, how you talk to other people,” Gomez said at the Los Angeles premiere of the film, of what she hopes people will take from the film. “I hope this starts a chain reaction of people saying, ‘Hey, I want to say something about my mental health. I want to talk about it and seek help.’ That’s one of the bravest things someone can do. Even if just one person is impacted by this film, I would consider myself the luckiest girl.”
Ahead of the film’s official release, we’ve compiled the most revealing moments. See below.
Selena Gomez introduced the world to the complexities of her mind and mental health through her new, aptly titled AppleTV+ documentary, My Mind & Me, which held its premiere at AFI Festival in Los Angeles, Calif., on Wednesday night (Nov. 2).
“I was going to release this documentary multiple times and it never really felt right,” the star told Billboard on the red carpet at the event. “Then the pandemic hit and a lot of people started having conversations around mental health, the isolation, people feeling depressed or anxious — never feeling those feelings before but have now. I just hope that this will carry on to something like a conversation that people will use to help later on.”
The theme of connection and starting a conversation rang true throughout the film, as Gomez sought healing from her bipolar disorder and lupus diagnoses as well as her 2017 kidney transplant through spending time with others — whether that be her best friend Raquelle Stevens, her childhood neighbors in Grand Prairie, Texas, or the children of Kenya during a 2019 philanthropic visit.
The Alek Keshishian-helmed film is a raw look at mental health, pulling back the curtain of fame to reveal a young woman who is actively working on her complicated relationship with loving and accepting herself. It’s rare to see a high-profile star show the more uncomfortable versions of herself to a global audience, allowing a camera crew to film her as she cries over her insecurities, undergoes a medical IV therapy for lupus and speaks at length about what it’s like to have a psychological disorder.
At one point in the documentary, Gomez likens learning about her bipolar disorder to reading about thunder and lightning as a child to help subside her fear of storms — which is a lesson she told Billboard she still uses to this day. “Knowledge eliminates fear in my opinion, because then you start having a relationship with your mental health, so I would suggest to learn as much as you can,” she shared as her advice to those going through similar struggles that she has gone through.
At an onstage Q&A following the premiere, Gomez elaborated on that same thought. “It’s OK to feel not good enough and to feel like you’re complicated and complex. It’s just about having a healthy relationship with how you talk to yourself, how you seek help, how you talk to other people,” she said of what she hopes people will take from the film. “I hope this starts a chain reaction of people saying, ‘Hey, I want to say something about my mental health. I want to talk about it and seek help.’ That’s one of the bravest things someone can do. Even if just one person is impacted by this film, I would consider myself the luckiest girl.”
Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me is out on Apple TV+ starting Friday (Nov. 4).
When filmmaker Alek Keshishian first met Selena Gomez, her management had asked him to direct the pop star’s 2015 “Hands to Myself” video, as she was a huge fan of his work on the 1991 Madonna documentary Truth or Dare.
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Over the years, the two remained close, and even tried to film a documentary of Gomez’s 2016 Revival Tour — but the timing wasn’t right. “She was going through a lot of stuff, and it didn’t feel proper for me to have cameras constantly in her face,” Keshishian tells Billboard, adding that the two later met up in 2019 to film Gomez’s philanthropic trip to Kenya.
“I said, ‘Let me shoot a few days before we go to Kenya to see where you’re at now,’” the filmmaker recalls. “On that first day of filming, I realized that there was a bigger story, and I suggested that we just keep shooting more in LA before we went to Kenya. There was a story here about a girl just coming out of a mental health facility, recovering, but also keen to help others. There was an interesting tension there, between being a patient still in your own recovery, but wanting to also step up and try to bring healing to other people.”
Thus, the new Apple TV+ documentary Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me was born, documenting the star’s yearslong journey through the heights of fame and the lows of a very personal crisis and back again. It’s perhaps the most vulnerable fans have ever seen Gomez, and creating a safe space for the 30-year-old to be herself was of the utmost importance to Keshishian.
“I’m a really empathetic person and I really become invested in my subject,” he explains. “I’m living their life with them, in a sense, and I do tend to become very close to my subject matter. [Selena] really became like a sister to me, and someone I felt protective over.”
Keshishian noted that he was “delicate” in his filming style, making sure Gomez was completely comfortable along the way. Notably, in one poignant scene in the film, the Only Murders in the Building star is visibly suffering from lupus. “I was like, ‘Are you sure I can film this?’ And she was like, ‘Yes, you can film it,’” he says. “By that point, we were so aligned in what we were trying to do that I think she felt invested in sharing those really unguarded moments. If she doesn’t feel that [empathy] from me, she’s not going to be OK with being filmed.”
And while, at this point, Keshishian has known Gomez for nearly seven years, there were still things that surprised him about the star while filming. “I just learned that this is a really special soul,” he explains. “I do think she’s on Earth to help others. When I first started working with her, I was like, ‘She’s a young pop star,’” he recalled with a shrug. “But during the course of the six, seven years now that I’ve worked with her, I realized she’s much, much more than a pop star. This girl is a humanitarian in the deepest definition of the word, and I think that will be her legacy.”
His affection for and connection to Gomez is exactly why he wanted to create something special with My Mind & Me — not only for her fans, but also for anyone going through mental health troubles. “I tried to tell this story that is very specific, but there’s also kind of a larger, almost mythological [story] in terms of the hero’s journey,” he says. “You get that sense that she’s just this young girl from Texas from the poor side of the tracks who is, on one level, on this meteoric rise to stardom, but on an internal personal level, faces some deeper existential quandaries in her life like, ‘What is this for? What am I doing?’”
He continues, “On that level, I think it’s universal and, hopefully, it’s also inspiring to remember that you can be broken and still change the world. We all have our darkest moments, but it’s a question of what we do with them. I suffer from depression and anxiety as well, so I think that that connection was big for me and Selena.”
Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me is out on Apple TV+ starting Friday (Nov. 4).
In the new book The Big Bang Theory: The Definitive, Inside Story of the Epic Hit Series, the show’s creators and producers discuss the Hollywood heavy-hitters who could have been on the cast — including Selena Gomez.
Big Bang Theory executive producer Steve Molaro revealed that the producers approached the Only Murders in the Building star several times. Before it was established that Amy (Mayim Bialik)’s parents were still together, Molaro had “kicked around an idea that Amy had been complaining about her awful stepsister,” who would be played by Gomez and be “beautiful and great and everyone loves her.” However, things never worked out due to scheduling conflicts.